Two truths and a lie

Also: What our readers were hoping for from this week's presidential debate [Donate ❤️]( [View in Browser](  June 30, 2024 Dear Cog reader, I talk too much. I always have. My sixth-grade teacher mentioned it not once, but twice, on my report card: “Katie’s one problem area continues to be her excessive talking.” Perhaps not unrelatedly, my children don’t have this problem. In fact, for the longest time, the challenge has been getting them to talk. When they were school-aged, I read article after article suggesting tricks and tactics to get conversations started. One article suggested reframing. It said don't ask, “What did you do at school today?” — the response to that answer is likely “Nothing.” — Instead ask, “Did anyone get in trouble at school today?” It worked, to a certain extent, but something about it felt wrong. Another article said if I went on and on about my day in great detail, they’d eventually open up in a desperate attempt to get me to stop talking. But when I tried this, my kids just got better at tuning me out. (Too bad my sixth-grade teacher couldn’t do the same.) For a while, we tried playing “Roses and Thorns” at the dinner table, [just like the Obamas](. Each person in the family would name the best part of their day (rose) and the worst (thorn), but giving triumphs and setbacks equal billing eventually felt counterproductive to me. The system that worked best for us was actually “Two Truths and a Lie.” In this game, each person shares three things about their day, two that actually happened and one fabrication. Each child played with varying degrees of success. The youngest always told them in the same order: Two truths first, and then the lie. We couldn’t get him to understand he needed to mix it up. In an effort to hide her lie among the truths, my middle child often got confused and told more than one lie, but would double-down, swearing she had done it right. But my oldest always delivered. His truths were purposefully boring, yet revealing: He got a B on his Spanish exam or he played lacrosse at lunch. But his lies were elaborate fantasies that made the other kids fall out of their chairs with laughter. There had been a zombie attack during math class and Mrs. Smith had boarded up all the windows to protect the kids, then blasted the zombies to bits with a shotgun. Someone discovered a Shark Man in the pond on campus, but the geography teacher, Mrs. Broga, saved the entire middle school. Of course, we would all correctly identify his tall tale as the lie, but he had a punchline waiting: “Nope. We actually played Hoover-ball at lunch.” My oldest child, 24, now lives on the other side of the country. My 21-year-old is away at college most of the year. And my caboose turns 18 next month. It’s been a long time since we played "Two Truths and a Lie" and talked about zombie wars. But I was reminded of this age-old struggle when I read [Mark Cecil’s essay]( this week. Mark wrote about getting the guys in his life — including his own three sons — to open up, to have “Big Conversations.” “Everyone knows it’s hard to get guys talking,” Mark writes. “But as a young man with a head full of ideas, I wanted more.” Like Mark, my oldest kid wants to dig deep. About a year ago, he told me he was struggling to get his younger brother to open up to him. And then, he told me, he remembered the best way to get someone to be vulnerable with you is to be vulnerable with them. He tried it out while they were on a surfing trip. And you know what? It worked. By publishing his first novel — and writing an essay for us — Mark made himself vulnerable on a much larger scale. That kind of exposure can be risky, but it’s what Cog contributors do every day. In my mind, there’s no better way to start a Big Conversation. Thanks for reading, Kate Neale Cooper Editor, Cognoscenti Support the news  Must Reads [The electoral college is bad for democracy. 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